مطالبہء اقلیت کا عالمی پس منظر

مطالبہء اقلیت کا عالمی پس منظر — Page 159

159 armed insurrection for the bourgeoisie nationalist parties had become supporters of imperialism and 'having assumed a reformist and class-collaborationist character' could not be expected to lead the revolution۔So November 1927 was the last occasion, for many years at any rate, when the Nehrus could expect an official invitation to Moscow۔They were in Russia for only a few day, but the articles Jawaharlal wrote for The Hindu covering this visit and which were later published as a book, show the deep impression made on him by this strange Eurasian country of the hammer and sickle' where workers and peasants sit on the thrones of the mighty and upset the best-laid schemes of mice and men۔They were, he wrote to his sister from Moscow, in topsy-turvy land۔All one's old values get upset and life wears a strange aspect here'۔He knew that they were on a conducted tour, seeing only what they were allowed to see; he knew too that conditions in the sprawling provinces hardly up to what was to be found in Moscow and its environs۔Yet he was convinced that the Soviet Union had made rapid progress in agriculture, prison reform, the eradication of illiteracy, the treatment of women, the handling of the problem of minorities and the removal of the sharp contrasts between luxury and poverty and of the hierarchy of class۔He was sure too that the Soviet Union had much to teach India, which also was a large agricultural country with a poor and illiterate population۔His mood was defined by the lines which he put on the title page of his book: